The Kraken in Love
- Mar 31, 2021
- 4 min read
by Tara Campbell
In its dreams, the Kraken remembers the touch of tentacles on its skin, of suckers all over, of being held by something other than itself. The Kraken was smaller then, not yet a beast. Back then whales were giants, not the tiny grey trifles they seem now; and the Kraken leapt with dolphins and raced with stingrays until it grew and frightened them, and they fled. Now the ocean is vast and cold and full of creatures that fear the Kraken, leviathan of the deep.
The Kraken is still fearsome to humans, but not as it once was. Now people smile when they hear its name, giggle at ancient terror, print its image on T-shirts and posters and socks. The Kraken has become history, myth, a caricature of itself. But no one would smile if they saw it now, if they spied it dormant on the ocean floor, at the bottom of a trench no human could survive.
The Kraken dreams the touch of tentacles on its skin, the elastic tease of other arms, a hint of warmth in the frigid sea. It has a new source of heat now, simmering up from volcanic fissures, from magma at Earth’s core. The Kraken sleeps among blind, transparent creatures, colorless ghosts drifting in the abyss unaware of the existence of sun, of sky, of birds and clouds, blissfully unaware of man—until now. Now, down in the deepest crevices, the creatures of the sea are being pursued.
Even in its sleep, the Kraken knows the click of machines, the whir of a rotor, the hum of engines. Back before it was a Kraken, it came to know these sounds as the mutter of Death, just before the thunk of harpoon and the crack of a rifle to finish the job, before, in a cloud of blood and ink, its companion slipped away, tentacles thrashing, falling upward, out of ocean into air.
The Kraken remembers the jolt of the last sucker losing its grip.
What could the thing-before-Kraken then do but fill itself up with a school of minnows, with a group of groupers, a run of salmon, a seal? The Kraken grew and grew until it could gulp down a pod of dolphins, a humpback whale. And still it ate and expanded until whole shoals of sea life floated around in its stomach like stars in the sky.
And even when it scraped itself against colonies of coral, scouring the reefs, leaving grey dead deserts in its wake, even then the Kraken remembered the touch of tentacles on its skin. And so, on it ate, feasting on fate, dining on augury. The Kraken opened its mouth to the past, to an age before motors and steam, when men sailed with wind and feared the deep. When monsters were real. The Kraken devoured its ancestors back to life, taking the meat of the ocean into itself until it was reborn. It gorged and slowed and sank and dragged itself along the ocean floor until it found a trench and slipped down into it, sinking, forgetting what or why it was.
The Kraken waited to die.
But it didn’t, and it lies there now, stirring at the whir of a rotor, the click of a machine, the steady hum of man’s disruption. It quickens, remembering the touch of tentacles on its skin, the thunk of harpoon, the return of its companion in pieces, on hooks. Bait.
And now, through fluttering eyelids, it perceives light, a blinding brightness from an unknown machine, and the Kraken recalls the haze of sunlight filtered through froth, remembers the churn of waves at the edge of its world. The Kraken reaches out and taps the new object: metal. Touches it all over: round. Gropes along a tangle of wires and protrusions: too small to hold a man. Pulls it down for a taste: foul.
Man-made.
And now the Kraken remembers its ancestors’ suckers on barnacled wood, the slap of air on their skin, the shock of sky above. The Kraken remembers the might of forebears’ arms around screaming men, pulling them into the sea.
The Kraken releases the machine, which spins and stutters before gliding up toward the surface. Now fully awake, the Kraken remembers the touch of tentacles on its skin, follows the machine up out of darkness, swimming toward blue, toward sun, toward churning horizon between past and future, unfurling itself, remembering now how it felt to devour the world.
Tara Campbell (www.taracampbell.com) is a writer, teacher, Kimbilio Fellow, and fiction editor at Barrelhouse. She received her MFA from American University. In addition to trampset, previous publication credits include SmokeLong Quarterly, Masters Review, Wigleaf, Jellyfish Review, Booth, Strange Horizons, and CRAFT Literary. She’s the author of a novel, TreeVolution, and three collections: Circe’s Bicycle, Midnight at the Organporium, and Political AF: A Rage Collection. Her fourth collection, Cabinet of Wrath: A Doll Collection, is forthcoming from Aqueduct Press in 2021.
